Nuns have played an important role in my life; so naturally their influence is strong in my work. Occasionally, they make an on-stage appearance. In my most recent play, still in development, nuns take center stage as elderly subjects for what is purportedly a research study on aging, but is actually something quite sinister.

In my research, I have talked to elderly nuns in various orders and am struck by the indomitable spirit of these women who have given thier lives to educate and guide the young. Few are saints; they're much too aware of the world and its needs. Some have been undeniably cruel in the classroom. The fact remains, they leave a legacy of well-taught children and young adults prepared for life, its challenges, its successes.

In talking to these women I am again made aware of the disservice done to nuns by Hollywood film and TV studios and New York stage producers who, unable to fathom them, perpetuate the image of the cute, slightly batty, helpless, simpering but saintly nun. The most flagrant of all these depictions was in The Bells of St. Mary's, an enormous hit in the '40s, which nevertheless told a colossal lie, painting the mother superior, overplayed by Ingrid Bergman, as helpless to rescue her parish school from financial disaster. Father O'Malley, Bing Crosby doing his crooner-priest shtick, saves the school. In real life, nuns built and ran the parish schools and the hospitals, with little or no help from Mother Church.

How is it that nuns have been so misrepresented in popular culture? There are exceptions, more in fiction than in drama or film. Lying Awake by Mark Salzman reaches beyond the caricature and the myth. But only since Vatican II have the laity and others been able to look objectively at women in religious orders. When nuns wore the habit, they were too "different" to be just human. One nun told me about reaching up to the top of the blackboard, thereby exposing an ankle to her third-grade class, upon which a boy cried, "Sister! You've got legs!" I remember an afternoon in high school when my Latin teacher turned around too quickly, displacing her wimple and exposing not just hair at her temple, but red hair!

After Vatican II we had to contend with a different nun. No more talents (or legs or hair) hidden from us. (Teaching nuns were routinely sent by their orders to get advanced degrees. Hospital nuns were highly trained; some became doctors.) Many women left the convent. Not all left their orders. These nuns simply needed to be out in the world, living in apartments, sharing the banalities of ordinary living without losing their religious ideals of service.

Hollywood and theatre need to catch up.